300
by I Live For The Fantasy
Summary: Somewhere in the interlude between the snowball fight with Jamie and that night, Jack muses over the 300th birthday that might have meant something if things turned out different, if a pair of eyes other than those of his reflection ever acknowledged his presence in the three centuries he waited.


**Aaand…I'm posting up another one. Yep, I'm officially addicted to this movie.**

Time?

A question, not an answer. What did time mean to him? Immortal, unchanged. What did three hundred years mean? Three hundred years just meant the children he loved, who died, who never knew that a winter spirit wept for them. Three hundred years just meant all those times he tried to bust in the North Pole, all those times he screwed up Easter just to get some kind of attention. All the noise he made in the hope that someone heard him.

Three hundred years…an eternity. And what did it matter? He might as well have slept for those three centuries, but he didn't.

Instead, he made mischief wherever he went, and learned to control his powers in the infinite time he waited for…something.

What did it matter, when the few creatures that heard him spent their days and nights at work and did not even know him? What did it matter, if no one loved him?

The Moon gave him but one thing. A name. For those three hundred years, he tried to take something, _anything_ else from the giant rock above, but nothing else came. Not for those three hundred years of…invisibility.

Invisibility. Unseen, unheard…to the rest of the world he never existed but for the Wind, the ice and snow.

No love. No clues. Just…nothing but the invisible wall of faith. Something the children reserved for Tooth, or North, or Bunny, or Sandman. But never, never ever for Jack Frost. Faith in Jack Frost never went further than 'just an expression,' or at its furthest push, a myth. A myth no one believed in, because no one saw the point of a spirit who wreaked havoc with the winds.

He did not blame them. _He_ did not see the point in his existence, let alone the rest of the world.

He stared down at the lake, the darkness he woke up to and the world he knew better than anything else.

A cold, solitary darkness. The one thing he lived and breathed, almost like a tangible thing. A _sentient_ thing, he told himself on the occasions he felt the need to fill the still silence with his voice. He needed to think something heard him.

As he looked at the lake, another thought crossed his mind. Something else he missed as a winter spirit: after his birth, he never again felt the sensation of submergence in water. Always, always the water froze hard beneath his feet. He wondered whether it felt much different to his life above the water, with the darkness that threatened to drown him and drag him down into the abyss.

The lights in his darkness, though small, brought him enough joy to smile. Just like the Moon that lifted him out of the water, the children pulled him out of the darkness and let him laugh and play just like another one of them.

But it always hurt, to see them look straight through him, oblivious of him. It always hurt to watch them grow up and forget the fun snow days of their childhood. And it always hurt to watch as, in their last moments, they passed his threshold between life and death and caught a mere glimpse of him as they floated away to whatever other side the Moon denied him, ignorant that this boy spirit protected them and laughed with them as children.

Yes, it always hurt. But if he made a difference to their lives, he did not mind, because it meant that he _existed_ as more than an invisible witness to the world around him.

Jack felt his heart once again break as he remembered the boy, Jamie, when his tooth fell out and he forgot all about their fun and proceeded to make a big fuss about the Tooth Fairy.

The Tooth Fairy. Just another spirit the children saw, believed in. Just another someone who knew the _secret_, the key to the door that unlocked a child's faith.

He did not know what Jamie, what _any_ of the children of the world saw in her that he did not have.

Sure, his playful nature got him in some…_predicaments_, but he tried, every single day he tried as hard as any Guardian just for recognition. What made them _believe_?

He looked down at the unfrozen part of the water, at the one person who ever understood him, the one person, he supposed, he ever found comfort in.

The one person the world _let_ him find comfort in.

Icy blue eyes gazed back at him, in so many ways a child's eyes and in so many ways not.

"Well, Jack…three hundredth birthday today, huh?" he said, and the image crouched with him.

"Pretty big day…I mean, not the _first_ century, but still pretty big."

Nothing but his own echo dignified him a response. As always.

What did it matter? Nothing changed. Nothing at all. Jack Frost still saw and heard, and the world still did not see or hear him in return.

"The world's a bastard," he said aloud.

He sighed. "Who am I kidding." He looked again at those blue eyes again and noted how open they looked right now, open…vulnerable.

Those eyes called out for help, for _something_…someone. His gaze looked up at the Moon again for a flash of a second, but returned to the water. He gave up on the Moon's reply a long, long time ago. Nothing, no one wanted him, no one but this image in the water.

He shrugged, told himself _again_ to accept it. He always managed, for a time, to forget if he tried. Just took his staff, put a smile on children's' faces and pretended that they saw him. It worked, for the most part.

The darkness that surrounded did not claim him yet.

He refused to let it. As long as he put a smile on one child's face, their light chased it away.

Then he remembered Jamie, and his gaze traveled upwards again. He called the Wind and shot up into the sky.

Might as well wish the kid goodnight.

**Ah, the one shot, when you just cannot escape the voices nagging in your head to write…I really enjoyed this. Please review!**


End file.
